Divided We Fall: The Division Delayed To 2015

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I feel it’s important to stress that we’re not just dealing with any old division here. This is The Division, and damn it that means something probably. Ubisoft’s equal parts shooty and paranoia-y MMO is still a largely unknown quantity (E3 demo contents aside), but I’m sure it wouldn’t be given the real life equivalent of a Twitter verified account without a good reason. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait a bit longer to find out what exactly that reason is, as The Division’s been pushed to The Year 2015.

“Working on The Division is a once in a lifetime opportunity for all of us at Massive, Reflections, and Red Storm Entertainment. We are creating something we are really proud of and we don’t want to compromise on quality. We are going to release the game when it’s ready.”

“We want to thank you again for the exceptional ongoing support. Community is at the heart of what we are doing and we’re very much designing the game with you in mind, so your involvement means a lot to us.”

Once upon a time, The Division was set to skip PC entirely, which of course would’ve been a grave mistake ultimately looked back upon as the beginning of the fall of humanity. Fortunately Ubisoft and co had a change of heart, and main developer Massive is aiming to make something far beyond just a simple port.

So that’s good news. There’s still that whole “linear flow of time” business we’ve got to put up with, though. On the upside, The Division will be on display at E3, and I’ll be in attendance. I’ll let you know all about it and also The Addition, The Subtraction, The Famous Rush song Subdivisions, and whatever else someday probably. Maybe. When you’re old enough. If you live that long.

The more time people are given to finish something, the more time they have to fuck it up completely. I really really love what I’ve seen so far of TD (and will get a new rig just for it), but this doesn’t sound good. I hope I’m wrong on this one, I really do.

Yeah you probably are. Development times are extended because the game isn’t good enough, not because it is too good and needs breaking. So this may be a sign that actually this is ultimately fatally flawed, or it may be a sign that Ubi think it has the potential to spawn them a massive new cash cow and so they need to feed it more grass. Its probably not though a sign that its great and needs to be made worse.

They don’t do it intentionally, of course. But the longer the process takes, the more ideas (that would’ve been sidelined cause they don’t have enough time for them) will eventually make it into the game. And the more you add to a soup, the worse it tastes. I’ve seen it happen lots of times.

Well yes sometimes a long development is a sign of ill tidings under the surface being covered up by PR, but usually you don’t hear much from the team in that case, and initial footage looks a mess like duke nukem or aliens games.

Sometimes delays make perfect games and many of the best games I’ve ever played were delayed multiple times and given ’till it’s done release dates – think half life 2 and anything by blizzard amongst many others. Generally Ubi manage to put huge teams behind these games and deliver highly on production values if nothing else, and they probably didn’t want to take anyone off a double helping of assassins this year.

Consider though, how many games have you seen that were released with a whole bunch of problems that took a few months of patching to fix, probably the majority of AAA releases. A small delay is most likely just this extra time needed to refine the game only they are doing it before it is released.

I find its the complete opposite of what you say tbh. Games in the past were ALWAYS pushed back, this is nothing new. When a game doesn’t get pushed back it’s usually because the publisher is obsessed with releasing at a certain date and will not allow the developers more time. Battlefield 4 is a great example of this, EA were obsessed with a 2 year release cycle and beating CoD into the shops, and it was a buggy piece of shit . It is now standard for this to happen. It’s also standard for games to come out and be a buggy piece of shit for 3 months because the devs weren’t given enough time. Years ago this didn’t happen and release dates were always slipping back a few months as the developers realised they needed more time to iron out problems. The difference is back then they were allowed the extra time.

I think they announced this game too early. When that first trailer came out, everyone at work was talking about how amazing it looked and how we’d like to play together. Then it was delayed and enthusiasm dropped. Nobody talks or mentions this game anymore, and now another delay.

I think they should have waited till the end of this year for their trailer, because with this new delay, I’m not gonna tease myself by reading any more articles about it until 2015 or later.